Tuesday, July 12, 2005

TTD to digitise keerthanas

Tirupati, July 11: Digitisation of old books and manuscripts have occupied a pivotal role at the international level and US, India and China were according top priority for the digital project, said Dr Raj Reddy, Professor of CMU, USA and IT advisor for State go-vernment and the TTD.

Participating as the guest of honour at a seminar on “Digitisation of books for posterity — the need of the day” at the TTD-run S V digital library here on Monday, Dr Raj Reddy said that a national project was laun-ched for digitising ancient books.

About 60,000 books preserved in Salarjung Museum in Hyderabad were scanned and digitised, he said. The director of SVETA, Mr Bhuman, who chaired the meeting, said that digitisation of TTD books and manuscripts of palm leaves was the brain child of Dr Raj Reddy.

In the fast changing scenario in the field of science and technology, digitisation was the need of the hour as there were many incidents where valuable books were destroyed in natural calamities and accidents, he said.

He said that thousands of books were destroyed in Alexandria in a fire accident, adding that the TTD was committed to digitise keerthanas of saint poet Annamaiah, who had written more than 32,000 sankeerthanas. So far, only 12,000 keerthanas were traced and the remaining lost to history. Mr S Jayarami Reddy, Vice-Chancellor of Sri Venkateswara University said that digitisation would enable complete preservation of the basic image data.